In recent posts such as Leonard Sweet, Frank Viola, And The Third Way and Root Of This New Downgrade here at Apprising Ministries I’ve been showing you how deeply the practice, and results, of Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism (CSM) within the pretending to be Protestant squishy evanjellyfish community. And in Mark Driscoll And Neo-Reformed New Calvinist Contemplative Spirituality I’ve also shown you that CSM has now pretty much metastasized throughout the church visible as it’s now even festering within the neo-Reformed camp. 

Beyond question the main catalyst for this spiritual skubalon is the Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster along with his spiritual twin, Southern Baptist minister Dallas Willard; both of whom teach the same spurious spirituality, which they’ve been pawning off for years as so-called Spiritual Formation. Please think along with me here; Foster’s “Christian” message, which is a direct fruit of his spurious CSM, is now so diluted he’s now a Living Spiritual Teacher right alongside such as Deepak Chopra, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle, and Marianne Williamson.

Another Living Spiritual Teacher is Emergent Church guru Brian McLaren. You may recall he informed us in the Christianity Today piece The Emergent Mystique back in the fall of 2004 that Foster and Willard are “key mentors” [1] of the neo-liberal cult of the sinfully ecumenical Emerging Church, which was the main carrier of this cancer. Interestingly enough, that article also introduced most of us to EC pastor Rob Bell, who would go on to become an iconic personality within the EC on par with a rock star; and somehow at the same time he also managed to be considered evangelical.

I already showed you in Through Rob Bell “The Great Enlightened Ones” Tell Us Man Has Divine Greatness that Bell is a practioner and teacher of the new form of Gnosticism that is CSM. Once Rob Bell, wildly popular with youth and young adults, was the sole teaching pastor at the emerging megachurch Mars Hill Bible Church; but now he has cloned himself in new MHBC “co-teaching pastor” Shane Hipps, a Mennonite mystic who’s also a purveyor of spurious CSM and teaches that all religions are experiencing God because within all of mankind—including Muslim Osama Bin Laden—is “a spark of the divine.” [2]

With this proper backdrop I’m pleased to bring to your attention the timely video below from my friends Richard Bennett and James Sundquist:

Professional deception and clever fraudulence are running rampant in mystical claims to experience God. Thus, the signature of Satan is seen in St. John of the Cross, Ignatius Loyola, Madame Guyon, Carl Jung, Richard Foster, and in such as Mother Teresa, Rick Warren, Brian McLaren, Leonard Sweet, Phyllis Tickle, and other deceivers of the Emerging Church movement who transmit this plague. 

In this illustrated DVD, Richard Bennett and James Sundquist expose the deceitful shams that prevail at the present time.  They also explain the scriptural method of biblical meditation and genuinely experiencing God. (Online source)

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Endnotes:   

[1] http://tinyurl.com/2fu2k8n, accessed 6/10/10.
[2] You can hear Hipps’ sermon and read a transcription of it in Shane Hipps Exposed.

HT: DefCon

See also:

INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM

LEONARD SWEET, FRANK VIOLA, AND THE THIRD WAY

ROB BELL AND SHANE HIPPS TEACHING MYSTICISM

USING CONTEMPLATIVE/CENTERING PRAYER AS “CHRISTIAN” MEDITATION

“CELEBRATION OF DISCIPLINE” BY RICHARD FOSTER AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEOLOGICAL ERROR 

DALLAS WILLARD ENCOURAGES CONTEMPLATIVE/CENTERING PRAYER

ACTS 29 NETWORK AND REFORMED COUNTER REFORMATION SPIRITUALITY?